Georgia Tech: the enigma of college football

[simmytbone]

https://sports.yahoo.com/news/georgi...212907263.html


Georgia Tech: the enigma of college football
By Dan Wetzel | September 17, 2015 5:28 PM
Yahoo Sports

ATLANTA – Eighteen of the 22 players who will start for Georgia Tech Saturday when it visits Notre Dame hail from the recruiting classes of 2012 and 2011. Those two groups were ranked Nos. 57 and 41 overall, respectively, according to Rivals.com. In other words, not so great.

The actual Georgia Tech football team they start on? It has the look of something at least pretty great.

The Yellow Jackets are 2-0 and ranked No. 14 nationally. Last season they won 11 games, a division of the ACC and the Orange Bowl. They will walk into South Bend as 2.5-point favorites over the eighth-ranked Irish.

This pleases coach Paul Johnson because having conventional wisdom knocked down is a particular passion of his. And not just in winning games with supposedly lesser recruits. Everything to him is a battle against groupthink and coach speak.

Most famously that means still running the option in an era when everyone else wants to go five wide and throw the ball all over the place.

It also means believing you can win at the highest level with kids defiantly interested in getting an education. Go ahead and accuse Georgia Tech of academically clustering its athletes, 11 of the starters are business majors, one is already getting his MBA, four are studying engineering (mechanical, industrial, computers) and there's a chemistry major in there for good measure.

Mostly though, on a day in, day out basis, it means not humoring anyone with even generally accepted concepts.
Is it special to go play up at historic Notre Dame, Johnson was asked?

"It is just like going to play anybody else," Johnson said.

Back when you coached at Navy (2002-07), your 2007 team beat Notre Dame, ending a record 43-game losing streak to the Irish, was that particularly meaningful?

"Honestly, it was just a game, a regular-season game," Johnson said.

So he's not one to get too emotional or introspective. He isn't going to play along. He sounds a little like a guy just tired of being asked things like, why do you still run the option when the answer is obvious: because it works. He did the same thing at Georgia Southern and Navy.

"We've got to do what we do," he noted. "We're not going to change."

Just don't say that the Yellow Jackets never pass. It might only be a half dozen or so times a game, but there are pass plays. There's been a passing touchdown in 10 consecutive games. Four former Tech wide receivers coached by Johnson are in the NFL (this includes Demaryius Thomas, but not Calvin Johnson, who left as the coach arrived).

Around here, nothing and everything makes sense.

This is a team with 17 former high school quarterbacks on the roster, mainly because Johnson believes that high school coaches generally put their best athlete at that position, and all he needs is some athletes.

Johnson can go on dispelling myths; he just doesn't seem to understand why he must. Oklahoma and Nebraska won this way. Sure he can't hand pick the best talent like Barry Switzer and Tom Osborne did, but it doesn't mean the philosophy is a failure.

The difference now is that Georgia Tech isn't positioned as some quirky underdog. Johnson isn't coaching a service academy or a Division I-AA school.

It's not just trying to win the ACC … it went score for score with Jameis Winston and Florida State before falling in that title game last year. It's now comfortable looking eye-to-eye with Notre Dame and Clemson and the others. It's trying to be the Stanford of the South. There are no secrets here.

"Our attitude is we've got to get better at what we do," Johnson said. "And if they can get better at stopping it in three days than we get at running it, then they'll beat us.

"But there's not going to be a lot of surprises."

Those class-recruiting rankings aren't particularly high but there is a reason they produce. It may be difficult to recruit five-star players to an academically focused school that runs the option – even one located on a beautiful campus just off downtown Atlanta. What they lack in true star power – dynamic quarterback Justin Thomas was a rare four-star prospect out of Pratville, Ala. – they make up for in depth. Almost every guy winds up producing, which is impossible for the analysts, who work hard at their job, to project.

"The biggest thing to me about recruiting, and that is why I get such a kick out of trying to rank, [is] nobody knows how hard those kids are going to work when they get to school and how much better they are going to be," Johnson said Monday.

"Nobody stays the same," he continued. "They are either going to get better or they are going to get worse. And, nobody knows how hard [a player is] going to work. When you move up in competition, if you have always been the fastest and the biggest, but you do not have any work ethic, it is not going to work too well for you when the level moves up and everyone around you is big and fast.

"I think, sometimes, we get a lot of guys with chips on their shoulder, sometimes we get the guys who are bigger and faster and they are good players. It is just kind of a combination. But, I think that is true for everybody in recruiting except maybe for 10 or 11 teams."

Georgia Tech isn't one of those teams. Johnson wouldn't hate it if the Yellow Jackets were. Maybe he'd say he wouldn't trade his guys for anyone in the world, but that Alabama roster, with recruits ranked No. 1 in each of 2011 and 2012, is pretty sweet. Then again, the Jackets would likely crush Texas, which had the second- and third-ranked recruiting classes, respectively, those years.

So someone still has to coach them. Johnson can coach them, although he'd prefer to push the praise on the players.

"I think [our] guys have done a really good job [getting better]," Johnson said. "Maybe you can give the assistant coaches and our strength staff [credit] for developing them, but I think you also have to give those guys the credit because they came in and worked and got better since they got here. They put in their time.

"To me if you're going to build a program, unless you are at a place where you can just pick ... who you want, unless you're at one of those places, and we're not, you better be able to develop them and you better be able to redshirt guys, and bring them along."

So here we are, with an academically minded school running an offense many considered outdated yet still challenging the national powers. If anything, Johnson's program is just hitting its stride, having established a culture that attracts the guys who want to get better in all ways.

Not that Johnson is pretending there is some unique mystery to this. It's just football, he notes:

"You've still got to go block."

credit: sports.yahoo.com

[auburntiger]

games being covered in my college football thread feel free to chime in